TFARCHIVE FORUMS

With the appearance of a mad scientist's evil experiment and an intellect on par with the Autobot professor, Perceptor, Reptilion is the longest serving general under the influence of the monster planet, Unicron. Reptilion was snatched away from a routine exploratory mission and forced to work on the dark god's decimated planetary propulsion systems. His skills in propulsion technology were without peer and was oftentimes seen hard at work at developing more efficient forms of travel using warp gate technologies. In battle, he is able to use his experience and mathematical abilities to predict projectile trajectories, detonation constants, and simulate a variety of other combat calculations. Armed with long range tactical missiles capable of carrying a wide variety of warheads. Able to accurately calculate a target's position from thousands of kilometers away. Special vanadium armor plating withstands even the most severe blasts. It is particularly ironic that this once noted scholar has been corrupted by the influence of evil and uses his brilliant mind to subjugate the universe for his master.

The first Universe line, which started in 2003, has always gotten a lukewarm reception. A lot of people consider it a punchline, which is really a shame. Because for all the flak it attracts, I've always thought it was great -- although admittedly, I completely ignore the stupid fanclub story that goes along with it. To me it was just a chance to get more Beast Wars toys, and in my opinion one can never have too many Beast Wars toys.

I actually passed on Reptilion when he first hit retail, since I was poor and there were other figures in the line that I wanted more. But a few years later I found a single lonely, dust-covered Reptilion on the pegs at Toys'R'Us. The poor guy had probably been sitting in the stock room for years, since I regularly visit the store and I never, ever saw him there previously. And since I actually had money then, I happily picked the guy up. I'm glad I did, because he's based on one of the most experimental figures in the BW line (Transmetal II Iguanus) and I don't think I've ever seen anything else quite like him.

Alternate Mode: Reptilion's beast mode is very distinctive. He's a frill-necked lizard, not an iguana like you'd figure since he's are redeco of Iguanus. But he's a mutated, cyborg lizard covered in beautiful colours that highlight both his reptilian nature and his mechanical origins. I'm not even going to try to give a blow by blow his colour scheme because there's no way to do it justice. His plastics are mostly brown and green, but he's got so much paint on him that the plastic only shows through on about 50% of his surface area. I'm pretty sure I counted ten different colours of paint on him, and many of them are blended and gradiented together beautifully in a way that we'd never, ever see on a modern Transformer. His frill is particularly wonderful, with so many colours on it that it looks like a hippy's tie-died t-shirt. He lacks the obnoxious chrome that the original use of the mold sported, thankfully, because that would have been a bit much. The end result works very well, making Reptilion into an exotic, dangerous-looking beast.

Unfortunately, looks are all Reptilion has going for him in this mode. He does feature articulation at the shoulders, knees and ankles, but the layout of his beast mode is such that none of it is really useful. Because his tail is inflexible, his front legs are longer than the back set and the directions his knees will move, there's really only one way to pose him.

He's got a firing missile launcher built into his mouth, a gimmick that one or two other Beast Wars figures can call their own. I've never been a big fan of it, honestly. Not only is his mouth permanently sculpted in an awkward, wide-jawed pose (his lower jaw is articulated as part of the transformation, but doesn't look good when closed) but pretty much the entire figure has to be designed around it since the three or four inch long missiles Hasbro use are going to extend through the whole length of his body. In Reptilion's case it worked out okay, but I'd still rather they hadn't used it at all and I'm glad the idea didn't survive into subsequent lines.

Firing Reptilion's missile causes his frill to flare out, which is a neat touch reminiscent of the dilophosaurus in Jurassic Park. Or rather, it should be. In practice it's actually fairly anticlimactic, with the frill only springing a few degrees forward at best. It's a shame the gimmick wasn't a bit more powerful, but since the plates that make up Reptilion's frill tend to fall off pretty easily it might be a good thing that it's not.

Robot Mode: Reptilion's robot mode is definitely very different from the usual fare. His colour scheme has calmed down somewhat...one of his lower legs is painted silver and bright purple, but the rest of his body is divided evenly between unpainted bright yellowish-green and brown plastic with painted gold highlights. He looks very different from the insane beast mode, but still very good.

The beast mode was unconventional because of his colours, but in robot mode it's his proportions. Reptilion is quite short for Deluxe, actually closer to your average Basic figure from the line. This is mostly due to his legs, which are quite stubby. His arms are quite long and he has huge hands, so Reptilion can nearly touch his toes while standing straight up. His frill hangs from his waist like a cape and his beast-mode tail is attached to his head like a gigantic ponytail, further altering his silhouette. The colours and proportions combined with a very unique head sculpt combine to make Reptilion look more like a twisted monster than a Transformer.

And what a head sculpt it is. Like a lot of Beast Wars toys, Reptilion's mouth is sculpted open with his teeth showing. Unlike most of them, though, his teeth are very detailed -- he's got a mouthful of jagged, uneven, razor-sharp fangs that could tear a lesser Transformer's limbs apart easily. The teeth are painted silver and stand out very starkly from a face that is painted a lovely shade of dark green. His right eye is painted a brighter green and his left eye...isn't there. Initially I thought the eye had been replaced by a cybernetic one that simply hadn't been painted, since most TM2 toys have asymmetrical faces like that. But it wasn't painted on the original release of the mold either, and looking at a high-resolution headshot makes it clear that it's not an eyepiece at all -- it's a crude, bolted-down eyepatch. Not only does that add to Reptilion's freakiness, but it raises some nasty implications for Iguanus as well...because the first Beast Wars Iguanus toy came with a full compliment of eyes. Ouch.

Reptilion has great articulation, with ball joints at the hips, knees, ankles, wrists and elbows. His shoulders combine three different swivel joints to create similar articulation, too. His neck is restricted to a simple swivel, sadly, because of how his transformation is laid out. He also has articulated thumbs which allow him to hold accessories, though he's designed for items a bit smaller than your typical 5mm peg. He's a very expressive figure with a low centre of gravity, big feet and big hands on long arms that can provide support in a lot of poses. And that's a good thing, because if you try to pose the figure in a neutral "arms at his sides" pose he looks pretty silly. Crouching down on all fours like the monstrous thing that his is, rubbing his hands together villanously, striking an overdramatic martial arts pose or doing the patented Dreamwave "crouch and grab" pose, on the other hand, he can do. The figure is so over the top that any pose you put him in is going to look comical, almost like a jester pretending to be a warrior. I really like that effect, though I can understand that it's not for everyone.

If he has a shortcoming, it's in the accessory department. That was the downfall for a lot of Beast Wars figures, but especially the Transmetal 2 line. A handful had nice weapons, but most of them wound up brandishing their tails or heads and pretending they were weapons. Reptilion does a bit better than that, but not much. His only accessory is his missile, which he can't fire in robot mode. He can, however, carry it around and whack people with it as if it was a big club. Considering how over the top the rest of the figure is, hitting people with a stick seems a bit...underwhelming, honestly. He seems like a Joker-esque deformed monster, though, so who knows what he thinks is funny?

Transformation Design: I don't think I've ever seen a toy that changes forms the way Reptilion does. He almost turns inside out, and yet he still manages to be very simple. It has a lot of flaws that are pretty clearly evident in the beast mode, though. 6/10

Durability: Breaking Reptilion isn't something you need to worry about. Losing parts of him, on the other hand...maybe you worry about that a little. His frill is especially problematic, because the parts fall off pretty easily and if he's in robot mode you won't notice they're missing until you look at his back. 7/10

Fun: This category is always very subjective, but more so for an oddball figure like Reptilion. His strangeness is a big part of what I enjoy, and if you're not into that you won't like him. But for me, he's great. 9/10

Aesthetics: The same as above. If you want a more conventional-looking Beast Warrior, you'll have to look elsewhere. If you want a deformed little freak with an absurd amount of paint applications, Reptilion is your guy. 8/10

Articulation: In robot mode Reptilion is great. His beast mode drags his score down, though. Even though he has a lot of joints, only one mode can really use them. 7/10

Price: I'm pretty sure that the Universe fandom consists of a grand total of me, and the completed auctions on eBay seem to support that. When unopened, nearly ten year old Reptilions sell for less than what you'd pay for a modern Deluxe, I think it's safe to say he's not a highly sought-after figure. 10/10

Overall: Reptilion is very weird and very different, even compared to other TM2 figures. I can certainly see why folks would decide to pass on him, but if you share my taste for the bizarre you'll like him a lot. 8/10

I too love the bonkers Universe repaints (well, some of them. The purple silverbolt is a bit much for me). Reptilion looks awesome! I'm still after a Frostbite too.

Really enjoying all these Beast-type reviews - they're figures you don't hear a lot about either way. Great to see them all re-evaluated.

I used to want a Reptilion.

After this review, I really want a Reptilion.

There's something in that sick puke-green and purple colour scheme that hits all the right buttons in me.

Skyquake87 wrote:I too love the bonkers Universe repaints (well, some of them. The purple silverbolt is a bit much for me). Reptilion looks awesome! I'm still after a Frostbite too.

I've never understood the hate for Universe, myself. The line attracted more flak at the time than any other TF line I can remember, even more than the denunciation that Kiss Players received or the knee-jerk Bayhate that the first movie line received. For my part I love it. I won't try to argue the it's one of the best lines, but a lot of the figures in the line were quite good. The wacky BW repaints are especially good, almost like a deliberate attempt to make a zany BWG2.

Frostbite's a gorgeous little bugger. He's a runt like Reptilion, and it's hard to say that the mold's really all that good, but the colour scheme is wonderful and like Reptilion he's got so many well thought out paint apps that it's hard to believe he's a Transformers toy. Until I started to go back and look at the Universe and Armada beast redecos, I don't think I realized just how far we'd fallen in that regard.

Cliffjumper wrote:Really enjoying all these Beast-type reviews - they're figures you don't hear a lot about either way. Great to see them all re-evaluated.

Glad you're enjoying them. I'm working on Beast stuff in particular because we've got a surprisingly huge hole in the Beast Wars review archive, but I'd like to review (or read reviews of) older toys more often. The way the fandom acts these days, for a large part, you'd think that Transformers went straight from G2 to Classics. For all the good and bad they brought, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, RiD, Universe, the Unicron Trilogy and even Alternators are mostly forgotten now. I think the Bay movies are partly to blame for that, since they brought in a lot of new fans and recaptured a lot of people who'd love the show as kids in the 80s but outgrew it. For a lot of them the intervening years just didn't happen.

Actually, taking another look at all this Beast Wars stuff I'm surprised by just how much it feels like the Movie line. Both lines feature unconventional robot modes and new design ideas that show that the design team was willing to take chances and try new things, sort of the polar opposite of the Classics and Masterpiece fare that are headline news in the fandom nowadays.

I love my Beast Wars toys. They easily make up the bulk of my collection. Beast Wars came along at the right time for me, as a Transformers fan. Being in my late teens and having some disposable income. I picked up a few Beast Wars toys to see what they were like and was suitably impressed to keep coming back for more. As much as I loved the original line, it was a little disappointing as a child to not be able to get the figures I would have liked (although I was extremely grateful for what I did get). Although I'd managed to get a handful of G2 figures, Beast Wars was my ground floor. Stock being easily available was a big help too!

It is a shame the line is a little forgotten now. They still hold up well against more modern toys (so much so that I actually found the 2008 Universe modernised homage toys utterly pointless - and ugly), and really took the ball joint technology ushered in in the dying days of G2 and made the most of it. Transformers were proper action figures for the first time. The integrated weapons were fun and the complexity of some of the figures (Tripredacus) and imagination of the designs were quite wonderful to behold. Then there was the TV show, of course...

I liked the unifying design of the packaging too. It's unthinkable now for a Transformers line to be deliberately marketed as something separate from what came before (even if that's not how things turned out!) and have such a stand out look. The painted character art was also very cool. It's a really nice, self contained line to get into.

Oddly though I find the Japanese stuff isn't quite my cup of tea. Although I like some of the more weird stuff like the Cyber Beasts, I'm not actually too keen on the mixing up of the template established by the Western line, i.e. reptiles = bad guys, mammals = good guys. It just seems a bit wrong to me , like Takara have missed the point somewhat (which , if BW II & BW Neo 's cartoon shows are anything to go by, is an arguable point).

Beast Machines is an interesting line. The Beast forms are much smoother and organic looking, whilst at the same time very alien looking. The imaginative Cybertronian vehicles used for the Vehicons also put to shame a lot of the crap that's turned up in both the WFC/FOC and LAM lines. The weird assortment of vehicles and jets this line turned up are right on the money - just the right mix of stuff that's a little familar but suitably alien looking. Certainly puts rubbish like DOTM Shockwave's alt mode to shame.

The Universe repaints of these moulds aren't the best, but the repaint of the Japanese Big Convoy toy as Nemesis Prime is superb. He's easily one of my favourite Transformers toys ever. A really nice and suitably evil looking character. Like RiD's Scourge, he also manages to put his own stamp of personality on a mould that is very much an Optimus toy, which not many of the evil Prime toys manage (which all strike me as dull all black repaints).

I think the Beast era through to RiD was quite a golden age for Transformers - with more experimentation and innovation packed into those five or so years than the brand has managed since. (RiD is another favourite line for me - along with the Universe repaints - I love the build team repaints as the Constructicons, lead by Nemesis in my house, whilst Roulette stands by Nemesis as his consort!). Good times.

Keep the reviews coming!

Skyquake87 wrote:Stock being easily available was a big help too!

Beast Wars was one of the last lines to have "old school" distribution, wasn't it? As a kid (well...not quite a 'kid' I guess...I think I was around twelve at the time) I loved it...I could save up money for month or two for a toy I wanted and reliably still be able to find it, something that kids nowadays probably can't say. When distribution is actually working the way it's intended to, stock moves too quickly for anyone to be sure that the item they're looking at will still be there.

Skyquake87 wrote:I liked the unifying design of the packaging too. It's unthinkable now for a Transformers line to be deliberately marketed as something separate from what came before (even if that's not how things turned out!) and have such a stand out look. The painted character art was also very cool. It's a really nice, self contained line to get into.

Oh hell yes! The Beast Wars packaging was beautiful, and the box art was even better than the vaunted G1 stuff (much of which actually sucked). Beast Wars was the only line I can think of where I bought toys based on how awesome the character art looked (I'm looking at you, Insecticon...).

The highly-detailed box art is actually how I see most of the characters in my head, especially for the first couple waves (the all-organic toys) and the TM2s.

Skyquake87 wrote:Oddly though I find the Japanese stuff isn't quite my cup of tea.

There are a few Japanese Beast Wars toys I'd like to get my hands on. The bulk of them are remolds/redecos of toys that Kenner designed, though: the cyborg beasts, Ravage, Sharp Edge, Hardhead and maybe a few others. A lot of the Japan-original molds, though...egh. Shellforming and/or really bizarre use of beast-mode parts in robot mode turn lots of interesting ideas into really ugly messes. Toys like Break, Longrack, Guiledart, Mach Kick...just ridiculous looking, the lot of them. Sometimes they're ridiculous enough that I'm vaguely interested in owning them just to laugh at, but the only Japanese BW molds that I actually like are Cohrada and Stampy.

Skyquake87 wrote:Beast Machines is an interesting line. The Beast forms are much smoother and organic looking, whilst at the same time very alien looking. The imaginative Cybertronian vehicles used for the Vehicons also put to shame a lot of the crap that's turned up in both the WFC/FOC and LAM lines.

I hate -- absolutely hate -- practically all of the BM Maximals. Weak transformations are a big issue and lead to a lot of figures that just stand up and change their head to get to robot mode. The general design aesthetic just isn't implemented very well in my opinion. But I love the Vehicons as much as I hate the Maximals. Some of the individual figures are really poor, like my favourite punching bag Scavenger, but others like Obsidian or Deluxe Jetstorm (and his redecos...dude was the Classics Seeker of the early 2000s) are great. What I like about them is the same thing that I like about the movie toys, though -- the concerted effort to make Transformers look alien. I wouldn't want every Transformer to look like that, but it's a nice change of pace when it works.

Skyquake87 wrote:I think the Beast era through to RiD was quite a golden age for Transformers

I'd agree, though I'd tack Universe onto that since it was predominantly redecos from that era. Warts and all, the whole run is definitely my favourite "generation" of Transformers. Clearly those years had better toys than G1, and BW at least is old enough to get the same nostalgia bump from me. The designs were naturally more creative than the nostalgia-driven Classics stuff, as much as I enjoy it. The toys were usually more colourful and visually interesting than a lot of the Movie fare. And the Beast Era was objectively better in every possibly way compared to the Unicron Trilogy, but then so is everything else.

Skyquake87 wrote:Keep the reviews coming!

That's the plan! And feel free to join in the fun, since you've got a big stock of BW toys yourself.

Warcry wrote:That's the plan! And feel free to join in the fun, since you've got a big stock of BW toys yourself.

Ah, looks like everything I have has been reviewed already

I wish we could go back to old school distribution. Seemed to be much easier to pick stuff up through properly managed geographical hubs that had a little autonomy. I'm sure there's a super smart business reason for this (probably a massive cost saving through having little in the way of local management/ staffing to orchestrate such things), but it did seem a heck of a lot better than the patchy effort we have now.

Skyquake87 wrote:Ah, looks like everything I have has been reviewed already

That's true, but a lot of our Beast Wars reviews are eight or ten years old by now. Transformers has changed so much since that taking another look at them with new eyes certainly wouldn't be a bad thing.

Skyquake87 wrote:I wish we could go back to old school distribution. Seemed to be much easier to pick stuff up through properly managed geographical hubs that had a little autonomy. I'm sure there's a super smart business reason for this (probably a massive cost saving through having little in the way of local management/ staffing to orchestrate such things), but it did seem a heck of a lot better than the patchy effort we have now.

Honestly, I think the only reason for it is that big-box stores like Walmart don't understand how the toy business works. Back in the 80s and early 90s there would be a big push of new stuff around Christmas and another in the summer, and that was about it. And that made sense, because for most kids the bulk of their new toys came on Christmas and their birthday.

But gigantic retailers don't have the time to understand nuance like that, since toys are such a small part of their business. So they treat toys the same way they would fashion or music, always wanting to bring in "new stock" so that people will buy, even though that will have very, very little impact on the target market for toys since most kids have very little disposable income. Of course, the "frequent, smaller waves" approach that retailers demanded led to shortages of popular characters and in turn caused the modern deluge of Optimus and Bumblebee redecos -- because kids want the most popular characters but stores are terrified of keeping them on the shelves unchanged because they'd be "old stock".

None of that is helped by retailers over-ordering every single new toyline ever just in case it becomes a huge hit, because they end up sitting on cases and cases of first-wave toys that they can't sell. And that's a problem of the retailers' creation in more ways than one, because if they didn't demand that manufacturers spread out their new toys over eight or nine waves per year there would be more than four toys on the shelf at any given time...